The Nessa scarf is made and worn to reflect on those in our lives who embody the virtues like humility, For me, someone I call Nessa.

At one point Nessa and I were very close. We spent a lot of time in a world that not everyone who’s twenty or twenty-one years old goes through and were were trying to figure it out anyway, and then as it often happens in life we just ended up going in our different directions. Perhaps somewhat awkwardly because neither of us knew if were were in love, or not in love, or something else entirely, and whatever the answer was it kind of didn’t matter because we were too young to know the difference anyway.

It’s years later and I’m walking rather aimlessly through the Lower East Side, half daydreaming but I hear my phone ringing with a call. And Nessa is on the line, and she’s there wanting to apologize, because she feels somewhat responsible for us parting ways. And it didn’t take me long to recognize how truly honest and humble and authentic she was being, realizing that I had never gotten a call like that. I still haven’t since.

I have to imagine that she had spent maybe a bit of time getting ready to make that particular call, but a truly incredible amount of time trying to develop the kind of inner awareness that allows one to even consider making it. I know in part because I ended up doing something similar later in my life, hoping to connect with someone I felt I had wronged, no doubt inspired by what Nessa had done earlier. It took me about four years. And I didn’t even call; I just emailed.

I sometimes run into people who get a certain kind of kick out of considering themselves misanthropes; somewhat jokingly, of course, but with some degree of genuine lack of faith in humanity. And it’s not totally unfounded; we desperately want to feel that there are good, humble people out there, but we don’t see them often enough. The kind that want to connect meaningfully with others, the kind that want to do what’s right—the kind who’d actually go out of their way to make that call, humble and vulnerable, just to say something important and worth saying. I’ve never felt the need to make that misanthropic joke because I’ve been lucky enough to have people like Nessa in my life. To help me recognize and accept that none of us are perfect, we never will be, but it’s worth doing the hard work to become better anyway.